leaving Hiroshima and Miyajima

This time I'm on the misty blue waters of the Inland sea, on a ferry between Hiroshima and Matsuyama. My conference starts tomorrow. To the left and to the right of me are many small forested islands; ahead in the distance on the horizon I can see a vague outline of coastline.

I've just spent on day in Hiroshima and one day exploring the Island of Miyajima. Miyajamia is famous for the beautiful red torii of Itsukushima shrine and Hiroshima is famous for -- well, you know what Hiroshima is famous for.

I visited the area around the Peace Park, where the monuments and museums are, the afternoon that I arrived from Kanzawa. My hotel's sole virtue was that it was very close to the Peace Park, but it was a much less interesting place than those "minshuku" that I stayed at in Kanzawa and Nikko.

The museum in the Peace Park documents in a fairly balanced way the events which lead to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; there were a lot worse things which could be said about why the allies decided to destroy a Japanese city as opposed to a German one which were left unsaid.

The museum has a large collection of artefacts recovered from the city, lunch boxes with the remains of carbonised food inside, watches stopped at the exact instant of the bombing. For each of these items, their story is detailed, the human life that was extinguished with the object. The effects of the bomb were described in unflinching detail. Only five photographs were ever taken in the city on the day of the bombing, I learned, by a journalist who entered the city that afternoon. He could only take those five photographs before he was overcome by emotion and horror, paralysed by the apocalyptic sight before him.

I spent a few hours in the museum, listened to all the audio commentary, looked at all the exhibits. Then I left for the park and walked to the cenotaph in the centre of the park. Standing before the memorial for the victims of the explosion, a curving, undulating arch, one sees in a direct line under the arch the burning flame, the flame that was lit that day in August in 1945, and beyond that charred structure of the "A-bomb dome", one of the few buildings left standing after the explosion. It was only at that instant that I realised, fully, that those events described in the museum didn't happen in some abstract place far away. They happened here, on the ground I was standing on.

Some comments I've read try to contextualise the deaths in Hiroshima by saying, for example, that one one night of bombing in Tokyo many more people lost their lives. But in Hiroshima so many people died in the instant the bomb exploded. 70,000. In five seconds every building with a kilometre of the fireball were annihilated. Such terrible destructive power had never been seen before.

At the same time, horribly, it was treated as a scientific experiment. In the instant before the bomb was dropped, people reported seeing several small white parachutes falling from the Enola Gay. These were in fact radio transmitter probes designed to measure the atmospheric pressure in the vicinity of the bomb site. After Hiroshima had been selected as a target for a possible atomic bombing, no conventional bombing was carried out over the city so that the effects of atomic bombing could be better understood.

Hiroshima, thankfully, bears the weight of it's terrible history very lightly. A beautiful warm ocean breeze permeates the city, and the evening the streets are buzzing with life and activity. I ate in two fine "okonomiyaki" restaurants both evenings I was there, a local speciality comprising many vegetables and seafood fried on a hot-plate before the customers. I am sure people ate okonomiyaki in Hiroshima on that day in August, too.

"For people who cannot go back home..."

I'm in transit, between Nikko, celebrated pilgrim town, and Kanazawa, a town on the coast of the sea of Japan. The ocean has just became visible, a foggy band of water only dimly visible a few meters from the train tracks through thick grey cloud. I should arrive in Kanazawa in an hour or two.

I've been here in Japan since Saturday, and I'm on my way to Matsuayama for a conference -- I'm taking the slow route, although trains in Japan are not that slow at all. Today is Tuesday, and I plan to be there on Sunday. My three days in Tokyo were exhausting, probably because I walked too much. On the first day I saw this sign--

To which I immediately attached a profound metaphysical significance. "You can't go home again", after all! These Japanese look after everything, even existential angst! Well, alright: I suspected it was a circumlocution for "homeless people". But, in fact, none of the above: these shelters are really for salarymen who've missed their last train home.

I'm still on the misty coast of the sea of Japan. On the left I can see some snow-capped mountains behind a blue-grey mist and on the right, the ocean and many houses with black sloping rooves, wet with rain. It does look like it rains a lot here. The umbrella I bought on my first day in Asakusa will be useful around here.

My arrival in Tokyo was slightly surreal, as perhaps are all arrivals in unknown countries after long-haul flights. After descending through the clouds, absolutely nothing was visible until a few seconds before landing: Tokyo was shrouded a thick fog, and heavy rain was falling. I found my way easily enough to my hotel in Asakusa, but as it was only 9AM I couldn't take a shower or readjust to the changing of continents. So I visited, in the pouring rain, Asakusa's main attraction, the Senso-Ji buddhist temple. It was still early, and the crowds had yet to arrive, and I spent the good part of an hour wandering around the temple and the yet-to-be filled streets until exhaustion and rain overcame me. Remember, it was really around 3AM for me, and I had not slept in 24 hours. I decided to find somewhere warm to pass an hour or two until I could check in.

After time spent elsewhere in Asia (Iran and China) I had forgotten that actually the Japanese do know how to make a good coffee, and I found one such coffee-house where an extremely hot cup of coffee was prepared from beans for me before my eyes, which gave me just enough energy to keep going until 3pm.

I don't have much else to report concerning my stay in Tokyo. After reading about the various districts of the town in my guidebook I had perhaps an exaggerated sense of the differences between them. My invariable reaction when stepping from the subway station was to think, actually, this looks very similar to all the places in Tokyo I have seen before. In the end, Asakusa, where my hotel was located, turned out to be the part of town I preferred. There I found everything on a more or less on a human scale, at least in the narrow streets around my hotel, where there were many fine restaurants and bars. Walking around Shinjuku was a bit like constantly watching television outside, so much is moving and changing. At certain intersections this is literally true: giant tv screens have been placed at major intersections, and everyone's eyes drift skywards whilst waiting for the light to change so they can cross. And also there is a constant aural background of dozens of small voices speaking to you simultaneously in a language you don't understand. There are I don't know how many hidden loudspeakers in the metro system and visits to department stores and pachinko hall can be an overwhelming experience.

[a few hours later]. I'm now in Kanazawa. I'll perhaps write more in the next few days as I continue down the coast.